


Yildun

by laudanum_and_wine



Series: Ursa Minor [3]
Category: Control (Video Game)
Genre: (So i gave him mine), Dylan needs a childhood, Light Angst, Listen shit is going to get weird when your dating your adopted family's family, Navigating complex relationships, Trying not to punch your family
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-29
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:27:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 21,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24975328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laudanum_and_wine/pseuds/laudanum_and_wine
Summary: Jesse knew from the moment her brother woke up that she wouldn't cage him like Darling had, but what exactly she would do instead was still nebulous.Darling knew from the moment Dylan woke up that he could never make the past right, and could never un-do the damage he'd inflicted.As for Dylan, he's going to enjoy his roadtrip regardless of whatever drama and angst are going on around him. First stop: the Grand Canyon!
Relationships: Casper Darling/Jesse Faden, Dylan Faden & Casper Darling, Dylan Faden & Jesse Faden, Simon Arish/Emily Pope
Series: Ursa Minor [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1780912
Comments: 31
Kudos: 27





	1. Chapter 1

The Oldest House had been out of lockdown for three months when Dylan finally walked into Jesse's office and sat down on the other side of her desk. She assumed he'd snooped through the room in detail before, he seemed totally confident in his approach to her desk, didn't knock or pause at the door, just sauntered in, still looking out of place in a pair of the jeans and tee shirts which she'd brought for him once the lockdown lifted.

"So how was the honeymoon phase?" He was smiling. He was always smiling.

Jesse didn't answer, just closed the file she'd been reading. She wanted to ask why he was here, wanted to ask and have him say something mean or frivolous. Have Dylan tell her he'd just broken an agent's arm, or he'd managed to launch a pencil across a room and would she like to see, and to play William Tell? Anything mean, and snarky, and their new normal.

"Lovely," she said, knowing she could be answering any number of questions. Did he mean Darling, the FBC, her new power, all of it? It was true anyway. That wasn't his question, really.

There had been a decrease in altercations involving Dylan since about one month after the lockdown was lifted. Jesse was sure her brother was still being a vicious jerk: she'd found Simon gritting his teeth after speaking with Dylan, Emily confused and distracted, Darling withdrawn and cold. Everyone he spoke to left the conversation infuriated and hurt, but other than one broken nose on a ranger (who stammered at her when she asked him, and swore up and down he had tripped) no one had left physically hurt.

Dylan had surprised everyone by actually making himself useful. He had taken to leaving post-it notes on her desk at all hours, outlining potential problems in the House. God knows he wandered the halls at all hours, and the scrawled notes of 'red lights at top of NSC like a person walking' or 'clog in the 3rd flr mens RR, Research' were a far cry from the detailed memos which Arish and the rest of Operations provided, but they were just as useful.

Dylan had been on his best behavior, she knew. It's why there were no Rangers following him any longer, why he could saunter into her office at all hours, even though he didn't when she was there. They didn't talk anymore, he didn't ask how she was, that's not the conversation they were having now anyway.

This was him telling her off for being happy with Darling. This was him asking if she'd seen him being socially responsible. This was him asking for some rope.

'Don't hang me,' she thought, an image of herself limp in midair chanting an incantation.

He didn't say anything at all. The silence stretched.

"There's an apartment waiting for you next to mine," she said. There was, has been for almost the full three months, since just a few days after she moved into her own unit. It was sparsely furnished, to be fair, and probably cold and dusty. She knew he'd think this was her rewarding him, and he'd hate her for it, but what else could she do?

"Okay," he wasn't smiling any longer, not angry but very calm. It's a calm Jesse didn't like, he felt like a stranger. 

"Come back at seven, we can head over together," she wanted to reach out, to hold his hand, didn't. She could picture the sneer he'd have if she tried. Pulling him close only gave him a place to push away from, so this was her with open arms, trying to be a safe place but not a prison.

Dylan stood, nodded, "See you then, Jess." 

He walked away and she saw hair was a wild mess, not long enough to tie back but still too long. Jesse imagined them on the road as kids, together. Imagined all the houses she broke into to live a day or week while no one was home, imagined her twelve year old self stealing toys for her little brother, imagined learning how to cut his hair so he doesn't look like a street urchin, imagined how her sad convenience-store-dinners would have felt if she'd had someone to share them with. She could have been a sister, could have been someone he was able to rely on, and maybe he wouldn't have learned to make every conversation hurt.

She heard the thought, 'I'm much wilder than you,' and it was in his voice.

The door closed behind him before she breathed again. She wanted this to work so badly.

So Jesse watched her clock, three long minutes as the plastic panels flipped down to show new minutes, then stood. Walked to the elevator, didn't tap her foot as it descended, walked up too many stairs to the Dimensional Defense department. Lexi was in, Darling was not, and Jesse left a note.

It read, "Leaving to show Dylan his new place at seven."

Lex won't peek at what was written, Jesse knew that, but still she felt the need to fold the note twice and tuck it under a tangerine when they weren't looking. Darling would find it, he always does.

Jesse didn't think everything would go to hell, she is not scared of her brother. She is not. She knows everything will be fine.

Just in case, she has written out the words, "I love you," very clearly at the bottom of her note. Just in case.

At seven Dylan enters her office without knocking. She pulls on her coat, flips a last report closed, and leaves everything but her keys in her desk. 

The Service Weapon hangs heavy from the holster sewn into the back of her coat.

Darling is nowhere to be found, which is good she thinks. Most of Research is gone for the day, the day shift of Maintenance already left and the swing shift already at their posts a million floors down. The lobby is empty except for the old man at the desk, who has been here too long to question the Director. He nods, glances at Dylan as though he knows exactly who the man is, and goes back to his crossword.

Outside, on the street, they pause ostensibly so that Jesse can zip up her jacket. She feels the cold shift of Blackrock flattening itself against her spine as the Weapon shifts to fit, accommodating. Intrusive. She knows exactly where the trigger is, knows that if she loops her finger behind her back and pulls a perfectly functional handgun will emerge without a moment of delay. She doesn't look at Dylan.

"Would you mind walking?" She asks.

"Sure," and his voice is level, like she hasn't heard the deep gulping breaths he has been taking of the polluted delicious city air.

Jesse wants to look over, she wants to hold his hand, she wants to smile and tell him she's so excited and so happy and so scared. 

This walk is very different than the one she took with Darling. She pauses frequently, looks in windows, reads flyers, trying to give Dylan time to look around without being obvious. She sees his eyes widen staring at the plastic food in a ramen shop, watches his head spin to follow the path of a bicycle covered in blue LED lights. 

They both pause to look up at the building she calls her actual home, all sleek white and black and mirrored glass. As far from the House as one could get in modern architecture, though she hadn't even picked the building.

"Come on, twentieth floor," she says as she leads him in and to the elevator. 

And then they're upstairs and she's tapping a door, "This is me." Then the next door, "And this is you."

Jesse unlocks the door and steps inside, holding it open, holding her breath. Dylan steps past her and looks around with exactly the level of detached disinterest she expected. It still aches a little.

"So the ten cent tour," she walks to the right and pushes a door open. "Bedroom here. It's got a bed, dresser, few boxes of clothing. I didn't want to end up buying a bunch of shit you hated, so it's mostly tees and jeans like you have at the Bureau already. Past that is the bathroom, these units have pretty nice showers. Kitchen you can see on the left, I grabbed boxed mac-and-cheese and some non-perishables just because, well. I keep buying fresh vegetables and then coming home two weeks later to find they're all rotten."

She lets her feet lead her into the livingroom, stares at the old TV, lets him walk the rooms with his infuriatingly slow pace.

"TV's are thinner than I remember," Dylan's voice is quiet but cuts through the air all the same.

"Yeah, you should see cell phones," Jesse can't quite laugh, but this still feels better. "I didn't get you one, I actually don't have one either… The landline in the kitchen is live: the number is on the post it, along with the number for my apartment and the desk for the House."

"How long have you been setting this place up Jesse?"

"Since the week I moved in," she admits. Months, and she wonders if he's angry he had to come to her, that she didn't come to him sooner. She can't take much more of the ache behind her lungs. "Dylan, I'm really glad to have you here, I didn't know how… I've missed you so much, I've been looking for you for so long. I just want a chance to get to know you again."

"Well then, it's convenient you'll have me so close," he says it with a smile but it isn't friendly. It's an accusation saying, 'This is another cage, and I know it.'

It wasn't, she wants him to feel at home, to have choices. She wants him to have all the things he'd missed out on trapped in that tomb of a building.

"Did you want to go back to the House tomorrow with me? To, uh, pick up your things I guess?" She wasn't sure how to ask this. Was it a cage he had escaped? Was it home? Would he go back on his own? If she asked? She had been cheating on a vague idea about making his unofficial wandering-and-finding-threats more of a, well, paid job. Maybe it was nepotism to hire her brother but fuck it, she'd made a whole department for Darling. Who would challenge her on this? The FBC owed her that much, owed them both so much more.

"Maybe another day. Think I'd like to catch up on my soap operas," his tone was bland, but the intentional nonsense of the reply was meant to cut.

It didn't hurt. It didn't. 

"Okay, I'll be next door if you need anything. Obviously. Good night, Dylan," Jesse lets herself out without looking at him, swings the door shut without looking up, and takes the few steps down the hall to her own apartment. She presses her forehead to the front door and listens: she can't hear anything, not Dylan locking up behind her, not Darling in their apartment, even the hallway air conditioning is silent as she breathes. 

She lets herself stand there for a long time before going to unlock her front door but- 

Jesse opens the unlocked door to find Darling already on the other side, rising from a chair in the entryway, looking about as forlorn and confused as she feels. She lets the door swing shut and wraps her arms around him in the dark apartment. Casper just holds on, breathes into her shoulder, neither of them speaks all their hopes and fears and frustrations. 

Jesse can't define exactly how she feels, knowing that Dylan is next door, able to look out over the city for the first time in years. Able to speak and move and behave freely, still able to throw a pencil across a room and maybe to break his own fall with at least a little levitation. Able to break an arm or nose, on himself or someone else. Able to eat convenience-store-dinners and cut his hair. To do whatever he wants. What she feels is guilty and afraid, she cannot find the words, and her only comfort is that the man in her arms understands this, and feels the same, and cannot find the words either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well I had planned on writing more of this before publishing but dear god today was Not Good and I need something to take my mind off it, so HERE. HAVE FIC.
> 
> Crits/comments/corrections are always welcome, tho my correction-timeline may be slowed due to personal drama.


	2. Chapter 2

Darling had woken up when Jesse stirred, had his elbows under him and was already sat half-upright in the dark by the time she stood. He figured pretty much everyone who worked for the FBC probably woke up fast, but Jesse was particularly speedy and if he wanted the pleasure of her company on the walk to the House he needed to rush to be out the door at the same time as her. He was just sitting up, trying to convince his body that walking was actually what it was designed for, and that being vertical was not an impossibility. 

Jesse was silhouetted in the doorway, the lights of the city bright behind her. It was a good view, particularly considering he was having to wake up before dawn.

"It's Saturday. Weren't you gonna stay home?" She'd asked, before a yawn popped her jaw audibly.

Darling had to stop, rub his eyes, replay her words in his head twice. He fell back to the mattress with a smile.

"Yes, thank you," he managed the words in a half mumble, eyes already closing. "Don't stay all day."

"I won't, just have two meetings."

"That's never stopped you before..."

He couldn't tell if she'd kissed him goodbye seconds or minutes later, when he finally opened his eyes again she was long gone and the sun was halfway over the horizon. 

He began the process of rubbing his eyes and convincing his legs to support his weight once more, only this time with the prospect of leisurely coffee ahead of him. The argument was easier to win with more than five hours of sleep. He was already dressed by the time he made it into the kitchen, because you could never tell how quickly a day working for the FBC might go sideways and sometimes getting coffee was actually an all day adventure littered with mortal peril.

Dylan was seated ten feet from the bedroom door, eating Fruit Loops at the kitchen bar, with what was probably every knife in the house buried point-down in a little evenly spaced row across the counter. Even the bread knife. 

The room did not smell like coffee had been brewed. Darling was suddenly painfully glad he had both gotten dressed and found his glasses.

Darling had not seen the younger man since he had moved into the apartment next door a week prior. Even when Dylan had still been at the Bureau, Darling had managed to avoid him thoroughly for weeks at a time, though he hardly thought either of them had been looking to start conversations. When they did run into one another Dylan would drop some painful barb within just a few sentences, and Casper would be left reeling through the hallways, trying to remember why he came back, why he was still here.

This morning Dylan was silent. He had left the milk and cereal out on the counter before him, beside the knives. Darling refused to give his breakfast companion the satisfaction of seeing him startled, and so walked around the counter and began making coffee. Dylan poured himself more fruit loops. 

Darling pulled down two coffee cups, set them on the counter with a little more force than necessary. He was trying not to speak, trying to calm down. The momentary fear of seeing Dylan and the knives had been almost immediately replaced by anger, which he knew was not a useful state to be in when talking to Dylan. Darling bought himself a few more seconds of deep breath as he poured coffee and cream into the two cups, then set one before Dylan, between a pair of the knives on the counter.

"Good morning Dylan," Darling sipped his coffee and was quietly proud of his even tone. 

"Morning Doc. How's my sister?"

"Fine," Darling's rage ratcheted up, but he managed to bite back anything particularly rude and inappropriate like 'soft and delicious.' Dylan wanted him angry and flustered, and he was trying very hard not to say anything that would give the young man reason to prove he could still throw knives telekineticly. "How's the apartment?"

"Spacious."

And what was there to say to a man who he had kept in a cell for years, who Darling wanted happy and wanted safe and wanted to see every day and wanted a million billion miles away from himself?

Dylan drank down an inch of his coffee, then poured the last of the off-pink milk from his cereal into it. He sipped the coffee and fiddled with a knife, twisting a hole into the wood of the counter, while Darling leaned against the stove and watched. 

"You're bored," Darling eventually said.

"I have a lot of experience with boredom."

He couldn't figure out what Dylan wanted. To be vaguely threatening, sure. It was years since the last conversation like this they'd had, but still the young man left him frustrated. So much potential, so intelligent, so spoiled, so mercurial. Darling smiled into his coffee at how little things had changed.

Dylan smiled back placidly, eyebrows lifting as though to ask 'What the fuck is funny here?' Jesse did the same thing when Darling started smiling or laughing without explanation, and that similarity sobered him for a moment. He couldn't actually remember the first time he'd considered what Dylan's future would look like if he failed to become the Director. It had to have been… Years ago. Darling had wanted to believe that Directorship was inevitable for Dylan, for a very long time he had kept every dissenting thought at bay through dogged optimism. The boy would be fine! When things went sideways, well, that was unlucky perhaps, but surmountable! 

Darling could remember the cold of the lab the day he realized, well no, the day he consciously acknowledged that somewhere in the back of his own mind he had already been making contingency plans for when Dylan was removed from the Prime Candidate program. He had sat there, on the office floor, feeling that a labcoat was poor protection from this existential chill and dread, and had tried to find a next step. 

What the hell could be done with the boy? He hadn't anticipated how violent Dylan would be, how unreasonable-

And now the boy is a man, drinking his coffee, spinning a paring knife in his fingers, being disturbingly reasonable simply because there was no longer very much to rebel against. Darling had known what to do with the boy for years, really, there was never any other option. Not when he loved-

Darling didn't believe in corporal punishment. He had that thought and before he could change his mind, he said, "What do you want to do?"

Dylan shrugged, finished his coffee. Looked around with disinterest.

"Not sure, what is there to do here?"

"Not here," Darling said, then held up a finger to clarify, "Not just here. Anywhere."

And now he had Dylan's attention.

"I'm still at a disadvantage, Doc. I've never been anywhere, so I'm not sure what there is to do there either."

"Want to find out?"

Dylan's face soured, "What, are you offering to chaperone me around New York? My own personal tour guide?"

"No, not at all," Darling squared his shoulders, walked to the door. It took some digging through the bowl of loose change and take out menus to find what he was looking for: a ring of keys. "Did you have any plans today?"

"No."

"How about this whole year?"

"No…" Dylan looked happier like this, confused and engaged, than he ever did with his stupid bland smile painted on. Darling was almost happy too. 

"Good."

+++

It was just past noon when Casper got back to the apartment, which gave him plenty of time to think about what an idiot he was before Jesse came home. An idiot who didn't regret his choices, but still.

The moment Dylan drove away in his very battered Ford Festiva, Casper had accepted that he was not, in fact, going to lie to Jesse. He had considered it, honestly it wasn't the kind of lie that would do a whole hell of a lot of harm in his opinion: just telling her what happened and framing it as though it happened despite him rather than because of him. The thought of that lie didn't make him feel any real guilt, and he felt like he knew guilt pretty damn well now. He didn't consider himself to be a particularly brave or honorable man, in the past intelligence had been more important, but he'd had to learn bravery rather fast before the Hiss- before everything. He had learned bravery quickly, that was what mattered.

Being honest didn't feel like bravery, though, it wasn't the right thing to do. It was just that while it occurred to him that it would be possible for one to lie, Casper couldn't be bothered to. Jesse had called his honesty "charming and dangerous," once and in that moment he had stopped and really considered what the hell made that woman tick. He still had no idea. 

He had never been a particularly good liar anyway. 

So Casper had spent the afternoon cleaning the apartment. At first he had assumed the tidying was just something to keep him busy. After a half hour he thought, 'Ah, I must be cleaning because it's something Jesse knows I'm not good at, therefore I am trying to impress her?' He let himself maintain that delusion until about 1pm, when he realized it would be much simpler for Jesse to throw him out now that all their belongings were sorted out and tidied.

He went to the kitchen, poured himself some of Jesse's fancy tequila, and packed a bag. It had been simpler when he hadn't considered or even cared about the impacts of his honesty. When he first came back, he hadn't cared how anyone felt about him, or really felt about anything. His fully functional mind came at a personal cost.

The sun was set and the tequila gone when Jesse came home. He felt a little bad, listening to her keys in the lock, watching the city lights in the dark. 

"Darling?" Her voice was a little quiet.

"Back here," he said, sitting up as she approached, running his hands through his hair. He should probably have stopped drinking at some point this afternoon, so Jesse wouldn't have to throw him out drunk and useless. She could just throw him out useless. 

"Why am I throwing you out?"

She was sitting next to him, and he didn't think he was drunk enough to have missed that happening, or really to talk aloud without noticing, and yet. Here they were. He set the glass with the last inch of tequila on the floor. 

"Because," Darling looked at her while he said it, trying not to glance away like he was ashamed. He wasn't. "Because I gave Dylan my car, a map, and eight thousand dollars cash, and watched him drive off in the direction of New Jersey."

Jesse blinked. She reached down, picked up the glass of tequila, and downed it. Then she stood, not looking at him, and walked into the bathroom, and after a moment into the bedroom. Darling assumed she'd seen his bag where it he'd left on the foot of the bed, and was fetching it. He waited a moment to be addressed, waited for her to dismiss him from her apartment, and bed, and life, and maybe from the Bureau.

The front door slammed behind her, and Darling turned finally, looked around. Traced her footsteps to find her toothbrush, keys, and leather jacket all gone. His things, still sitting on the foot of the bed.

"Well fuck."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I may just like making Casper say "fuck." What, like it isn't satisfying AF? Please.
> 
> Anywho, now we have some drama, because Dylan is an infinite fountain of potential drama and angst for himself and for others! Someone has to do this important job, and he sure is good at it! 
> 
> I feel like I might be making Darling a little to, hm, aggressive? Petty? I know for sure that the Darling we see in the canon presentations does NOT seem the type to even consider trading jobs with Dylan. But I also feel like I've slowly been ratcheting the character toward being alive mostly because of frustration and tenacity, so I dunnow: maybe it fits but only if you read Full of Stars first.
> 
> Crits/comments/corrections are appreciated as hell guys! Thank you all for the feedback this far, from the in-depth to the short emoji-only style comments. I love you all. <3


	3. Chapter 3

Dylan flipped on the TV set, caught the opening theme song of Night Springs, and immediately flipped it back off. He'd had enough of that for one lifetime.

It was the third evening that he'd checked into a hotel rather than sleep in the car, and he wasn't sure if he loved or hated the concept of the hotel in general. On the one hand once you were checked in and had the curtains closed, all hotels felt essentially the same. On the other hand they all felt the same. He decided he loved hotels, because he had the luxury of having an opinion, and fuck it, having a door that locked from inside rather than outside was a novel feeling.

Also, to be in a hotel was to be outside of a car, which was novel as well. It had only taken about 13 hours of constant driving before the elation of being able to drive wore thin. His prior experiences driving had been limited first to observation of his parents, then a few lessons with Salvador around the quarry with trucks and forklifts, and recently an hour-long refresher with Casper on the way out of New York. As soon as Dylan had felt confident enough not to get pulled over, he'd dropped Casper in what he hoped was a shitty part of town and didn't look back. 

The drive from there to Philadelphia had been a frustrating slog, trying to stay at exactly the speed limit where he could, using his signals compulsively, quietly willing himself not to be pulled over. He had been concerned that every black SUV was it, was the one looking for him. While he hadn't been afraid they would drag him back to the Bureau, the thought of having to kill whichever agent caught up with him was, well, it wasn't a pleasant thought. He'd never really wanted anyone dead, but like many of the other times it had happened, if they forced his hand… He wasn't sure what he would do if it was Jesse. He had tried not to think about it.

Dylan had only slept once he reached the suburbs of Atlanta: found a lovely quiet pancake restaurant with a few big rigs parked in the lot, and thought that would probably be good enough. Selling the Festiva for cash and buying a truck in Alabama had been shockingly easy. Now he was on his fourth car, and found that no matter the car or height, the locks, the tint on the windows, he just never slept easily with one pane of glass between himself and the world.

Shaking off the desire to examine that particular phobia too closely, Dylan opened the curtain and turned off the lights in the room. Here was a pane of glass, and here he controlled the visibility. Outside the sunset couldn't be seen directly, hidden behind the edge of the gas station to the right, but his second floor window looked out onto a wide stretch of southern sky that was awash with red and orange. Dylan watched the color fade, the reds desaturating slowly to bruised purples then grey, then the clouds were simply patches of lighter blue against a darkened sky. He thought he saw a glitter of aquamarine once, near the horizon, but it was gone before he could be sure.

After dark he went walking, brought only the room key. He still wasn't used to having pockets (hell, even shoes occasionally felt weird) and couldn't figure out what he was supposed to bring with him at any given time. Dylan took a path along the railroad tracks headed out of town, opened his hands to let the sweetgrass trace lines on his palms. On either side of the elevated hill the tracks ran down was a long chain of swampy ponds, loud with frogs and crickets, stinking like standing water and the sweet smell of rot. It smelled like the Meadow.

A stray dog was scuffling through the grass nearby, obviously set loose from one of the squat ranch houses with ragged fences. It sniffed at him, paced around a pool of black water to get closer, whined, barked. Dylan knelt, and the mutt came trotting over, tail flipping in joy. He scratched the dog behind the ears for a moment, before it backed away shyly, as though embarrassed of the affection.

Dylan stood, continued his slow meandering down and across the train tracks. The dog ran ahead and behind, a pleasant kind of half company occasionally running up to sniff his boots then bolting away to growl at frogs.

Somehow after a few hundred yards the night had grown eerily silent, crickets hushing as they walked, until the only sounds were the footsteps of him and the dog, which ran less now. The air felt cold, in a way the desert summer should never be. The dog had followed him a half mile then it disappeared into the weeds.

He was outside of town now, alone, the moon lighting the tracks just enough to see his path. From the corner of his left eye Dylan saw the same shimmer of green just behind the place where the dog had vanished into the high grass. In the distance behind the weeds a dark ruin of a house loomed, the gaping eyes of broken windows glaring in the night. 

Dylan stared down the house. It was broken, swaybacked, roofline drooped between the eaves. Empty fields stretched on either side, and beyond it Dylan could see the main road out of town, lit badly with the sodium glow of streetlights. Despite it being well into summer, the fruit trees along the fence line were leafless and black.

From somewhere inside the house he heard the stray dog yip, then silence.

"Yeah, fuck that."

Dylan walked back to the hotel, locked the door behind him, and slept deeply until well past dawn. In the morning he checked out at the front desk, filled up the gas tank of the battered Buick he'd been driving for the last four days, and bought Funyuns and Pepsi for breakfast.

On his way out of town he drove past the dark house from the prior night. There was no green glimmer, though he saw a pile of viscera, skinned muscle and guts covered in flies, a mound just inside a dark doorway. It should have been too small a thing to notice, too far away, too dark in the doorway, but he saw it all the same.  


Three hours later he saw a sign for the Grand Canyon and took the exit. Why not?

He ended up at a scenic overlook with no interpretational material or visitors center, which was absolutely perfect. The only other car in the lot was a rig, a sunscreen blocking off the window. Dylan circled the lot once on foot, figured the trucker was asleep, and so walked past the barricades to the edge of the canyon. He sat on a loose rock, delighting in the precarious seat so close to the edge, and tossed stones into the canyon for a few minutes. They bounced down the grassy slopes of the near-wall unsatisfyingly. 

The view was nice, but not what he had hoped for. He'd seen deeper gulfs inside the House, with steeper walls. Bottomless pits where a dropped stone never made a sound, ever. The vertigo of the Oldest House was a massive pale creature just out of sight in the dark, something always threatening to climb out of the depths with claws sunk deep in the Blackrock walls, an eyeless nightmare who's siren call begged you to fall down, down, down into the night and its thousand razor teeth…

Here it was just a big hole. The vertigo was like someone shrugging, saying, "I dunno, jump maybe?" Dylan felt mildly insulted at the banality. 

It took several minutes of dropped rocks, but he eventually levitated a pebble outward a few hundred feet before letting it fall into the void. He waited, but couldn't hear a sound of it hitting anything over the wind and birdsong, so he stood.

"You shouldn't do that," The old woman looked worried and sad at the same time. She was small, hair half grey and with bright eyes, was standing behind the low rock barricade behind him. Dylan walked back to stand opposite her, just on the other side of the literal wall society had created (which he liked, made him downright gleeful) and feigned misunderstanding. 

"I shouldn't cross the wall?" He smiled, tipped his head like Nipper the dog, wondered if he would scare her the way it did Bureau employees.

"No," she shook her head in reply, then lifted a hand and wiggled it. "The rock thing. You shouldn't do that."

He climbed over the wall quickly and the old woman stepped back as he did, leaving a wide gap between them. She reminded him of a bird. Dylan looked around, saw a small family a few hundred yards away, taking photos. Mom, Dad, bored teenage children trying to look interested. He sat on the rock wall then, watched the old woman. 

"If you do that out in the open… They'll find you. They'll know," she sounded a little afraid, glancing at her family.

He patted the wall. She sat, still half distant, and stared at him. 

"Can you do something like that?" He asked.

"I used to," she shifted, clutching a purse he hadn't noticed before close to herself. "I used to float pennies above Samantha's crib. She liked the way they sparkled.Then some men came by, my son called them, and talked to me. I can't remember what they said. I couldn't remember… Then when they left, I couldn't float anything anymore."

Dylan thought that didn't sound like anything he'd heard of, not like the FBC. But what did he know.

"I don't remember what they said," the old woman repeated. 

"It's okay," Dylan pulled a penny from his pocket, shiny copper with maybe a sparkle of green, oxidized, and held it in his hand.

"Don't-"

"It's okay, because they already found me, and I got away," he said. The penny floated a half inch above his palm. The old woman watched it, a little sadly maybe. Dylan couldn't tell. 

He levitated the penny in his palm, watched her family talking in the distance, watched the daughter pretending not to be scared of the steep drop before them. The void must be loud for that one. The father glanced over after a few minutes, probably about to come check on his mother talking with a stranger in a parking lot in the middle of nowhere.

Dylan set the penny on the rocks between himself and the old woman with a barely audible click, and stood.

"Goodbye."

"Be safe," she replied, hands still clutching her purse.

Dylan didn't look back when he left. At sunset he stopped to watch the colors fade. He wasn't sure where he was, but it was flat, and he looked for the supposed green flash he had heard was visible some nights. He didn't see it, just a hazy hot red orb dripping and melting along the horizon.

"Yellow and red in the eye," Dylan muttered the words, realized he was smiling. "You do remind me of home."

He scratched his arm, and shocked by the pain of it looked down to find he was sunburned. Funny.

That night he slept in the car somewhere outside of Vegas. He could see the glow of lights in the sky to the west and even though the stars were barely visible there it reminded him of the quarry. 

He watched the sky through the rolled-down window, shivered from the sunburn. Remembered sneaking into the quarry, climbing the sheer Blackrock that smelled like ozone and blood when it broke in his hands, then lying under the stars. He had pretended he was camping with his family. He had turned his palm up, fingers chilled from the alien air, imagined Jesse's hand was just above his own, just about to lace their fingers together. He had watched the green auroras that were so rare even there under an alien sky, and imagined the sounds of distant workers were actually Mom and Dad in the house. In a minute Jesse would grab his hand and say, 'Come on, stupid, you're gonna get covered in bugs,' and then he and Jesse would stand up from the lawn, and walk into the house, and get ready for bed, and she would yell at him when she had to brush the tangles out of her hair, and he punched her but not hard, and she snuck downstairs and brought them both ice cream as an apology. She always put a scoop of raspberry jam in his, because he didn't like the plain vanilla Mom always bought, but this time they didn't have jam so she had put a handful of grapes, only he looked down and they were green legos. When he looked up Jesse wasn't eating her ice cream because it had turned into a bowl full of crystals, bright water-blue, and she was chewing them and her mouth was bleeding, and he tried to tell her to stop but she couldn't hear him, so he turned and told Casper to help her, to stop her, she was going to hurt herself, but Casper was behind glass and so was Jesse, no, Dylan was the one behind glass-

Dylan woke up an hour before dawn in the bitter cold of desert night, staring out the rolled down window of the Buick at the sky above Vegas.

"Fuck that," he growled, scrambled into the front seat, and turned over the engine. 

He drove into the city as fast as the Buick could manage, which wasn't fast enough. By nine that morning he'd found a suitably distant car lot with cars that looked as questionable as his own. He traded in the Buick for a convertible VW with chipped paint, and drove with the battered ragtop up to a drugstore for water and sunscreen. He turned right and followed the freeway north, wondering if he could talk his way into Area 51.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for that delay folks, but my excuse for this one is solid: I jacked up my dominant hand! It's not broken, but jfc it's been two weeks and still hates me. This chapter was finished very slowly with my left hand and I hated it tbh.
> 
> I know after the last two chapters this is a little rambly, but listen: roadtrips are like that! Also don't judge me about funyuns for dinner, I joked about Dylan needing a childhood so here's mine and dude. I was a funyuns for dinner kid when I was lucky. We were on the road a LOT when I was little, it was memorable. I want to say good, but maybe character-building is more accurate. 
> 
> As always crits/comments/corrections are appreciated, as are single word or emoji comments. Be as verbose or brusque as you like, I love it all.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jesse manages to find a way to hold a grudge while facing a new threat from the Hiss. Ahti puts up with a lot, all he wants is to not have his shit broken.

Jesse hadn't shot anything in twenty four hours and frankly it was making her a little twitchy.

Last Saturday, after she spoke with Casper, she had jammed her toothbrush into a cheap prefab dopp kit which she'd had under the sink, and hadn't even been angry. She'd been a little angry as she stood in the doorway of her bedroom closet, changed into her sturdy boots and shoved her arms through the sleeves of her leather jacket. She'd become very fucking angry when she pulled open her top dresser drawer intending to grab a few pairs of clean underwear to stuff into the dopp kit, and she'd seen a pair of lacy grey panties. Panties she certainly had not bought because she thought that they looked like they would be comfortable, and she had taken off the tags and washed them but hadn't even had a chance to show them off yet, and where in the fuck did Casper fucking Darling of all people get off thinking that he could-

She had left the apartment quickly, to avoid yelling. Or shooting. She left the grey panties half falling out of the top drawer, entirely in hopes he'd see them and be bitter about her absence. 

One quick elevator ride later she had stood on street level, looking to the west where the House was just visible behind other buildings, and wondered where the fuck she was going. Her first thoughts had been to get a car of some kind from the FBC garage, something unmarked and fast, to take off to find her brother.

But she didn't know how big a headstart he had, or that he had actually gone west, or if he wanted her to. Which made her pause. She had crossed her arms, tried to listen for Polaris, heard only a tiny chime of blue. Not helpful. 

When she had realized she was taking her own pulse, like Darling would, a comfortable vice on her wrist, she had been angry at herself. She went back to the House, dropped her bag in her office, and practically jogged to Maintenance.

Ahti had a whole list of jobs for her, shooting and running and killing and repeating, until the last time she'd come back to his office at three in the morning he had pressed a mop and headphones into her hands. She had changed into a coverall just to keep the gore off her clothing after the first encounter with the clog, and felt like an actual janitor now. She remembered her last job cleaning up puke and spilled soda, trying to save enough to get to the East coast, and as she walked the halls listening to music from her childhood she finally let herself cry. And rage.

"Mother FUCKER, did you not want me to find you?!?" She swung the mop into a wall and felt the rattle of splintering wood reverberate in her hands. "You selfish fucking ASSHOLE."

Jesse had sunk down against a wall and cried in Maintenance, until she heard the steps of agents telling her a shift change had started, which meant it was probably six in the morning. 

Ahti had been napping in his chair when she got back, and she'd fallen asleep on his sofa without waking him. 

A few hours later he shook her awake with a glare.

"You owe me a mop."

"Sorry Ahti," she sat up. "I'll find you a new one." 

"I expect you do, they don't cost strawberries," Ahti walked back to his desk, lit a cigarette, glared at her. 

A yawn overcame her, and when Jesse had finished rubbing her eyes she was alone with the scent of cigarette smoke. She eyed the pack on the desk and thought it was terribly inconvenient that everyone here smoked the same damn brand so that even this reminded her of Darling, of the occasional stress-cigarettes he swore he didn't smoke but which lingered in his coat collar on particularly bad days.

On Sundays staffing was relatively minimal outside of Research and Containment. Jesse managed to get to her office, showered, and changed into casual clothes without talking to anyone. 

The stack of reports and budget items on her desk was incredibly welcome. She spent several hours grinding through work until the words bled together, then she had to admit she was killing time and stopped.

They were both such fucking assholes. Of course they didn't get along, and of course they were close, of course they hated each other, because they were both such fucking assholes.

She opened a drawer in her desk and rooted through it until she found trail mix and an apple. She ate the trail mix flat on her back on her sofa, after opening her office door and launching the apple in a perfectly straight line down the hallway to splatter across the elevator doors.

She cleaned up the apple after lunch.

Jesse still wanted to go after Dylan, but didn't. She wanted to punch his nose in, which wasn't the right motivation, she was fairly sure of that much.

Monday was marginally better, because Emily was in-office and kept Jesse busy with a lab explosion. Everyone was fine, one lab assistant needed stitches in her scalp but Jesse assured her that mohawks were the height of fashion (and also that there was no FBC policy saying she couldn't also dye her hair green if she wanted). The woman, who was middle aged, laughed but seemed to appreciate what Jesse considered a pretty useless pep talk. 

By Thursday Jesse felt significantly less angry. She had seen Darling at the cafeteria that afternoon, and while she had felt her heart race in anger at the sight of him, it hadn't felt as immediate or dangerous. She wondered if the humm from Polaris changed with her heartrate, was betting it did because of the way he had looked up at her from across the room the moment she saw him, like she had screamed his name. He stood, but she left before she could find out if he had intended to talk to her or flee.

Dylan had been out there for four days, and she hadn't heard anything about a mass murder or city wide fire or monsoon headed straight for Washington DC. She hadn't expected any of that, but still. A little part of her had worried.

Jesse had initially wanted to send out all her field agents, then realized not only would that make Dylan irate it would also be a death sentence for her agents and him and… She couldn't let him feel trapped. Or threatened. 

It had to be her.

Well, her or Darling, but that was a whole other kettle of fish and while she was mad at Darling she didn't want him dead. She was fairly sure she didn't want him dead.

The postcard was still sitting on her desk, a bright sunset staring up in a room that had never never seen the sun. The card read just "wish you were here," in a blue font printed above the sunset. No note on the back, just the Bureau address and "Jesse" written in spikey barely legible ballpoint pen and a quick drawing of a smiley face.

It was the kind of joking barb she had actually wanted from Dyllan in the last few weeks. 

"They deserve each other, on the selfish fucking asshole scale," Jesse muttered it outloud. It felt good to say those words aloud after everything. 

She was stuffing a spare suit into a duffle bag as she spoke, probably wrinkling it terribly, but it was all she had here at the House and she was going to leave this afternoon and head West-

With a muted thump Carla and Raya burst through the door at the same time. Jesse already had the Service Weapon drawn, bag dropped to the floor with a dress shirt half fallen out, when Raya spoke.

"Lightswitch in Central Executive, bright red, attached to the black pyramid," her words were clipped. 

Jesse was out the door, gun in hand, Raya jogging next to her.

"Casualties?"

"Possibly, it's definitely Hiss. No one can get within thirty feet," Raya slowed as they approached the upper level of the room in question. "A few agents were walking through the central area, they appear to be unconscious. No one has been able to approach, no matter the HRA version they're wearing."

Jesse walked slowly to the parapet looking over Central Executive. She could feel the waves of headache, bright and sharp, washing past her and down the hall. The concrete of the room had shifted slightly, throwing up blocks that trembled along the edges of the room. Jesse turned to see Raya, and beyond her Carla, both half-obscured by a rainbow blur but clearly also behind a concrete block. They were, consciously or no, avoiding direct line-of-sight with the Black Pyramid.

"Full Directoral lockdown, now. Get all the excess NRAs and ring this room. Someone get Darling down here now, but- He doesn't wear an HRA," Jesse stared at Raya, trying to maintain eye contact through the blur around them.

"None at all? Not even the badge-clip ones?" Raya seemed a little scared, which was mildly amusing. 

Jesse was almost sure that 'amused' was not an appropriate emotional response for her to be having right now. 

"Have you ever seen him even wear his badge? He's immune. Maybe. Get one on him, if you can, and if you can't-" Jesse left the rest unsaid. She couldn't think about a Hiss-controled Head of Defense right now. She couldn't think about Darling. The moment of hysteria induced amusement had passed.

"I'll have Simon find him," Raya said, and Jesse understood that. If anyone had to put Darling down, at least it would be-

"Fuck," Jesse allowed herself only that one word. She had to keep moving. "Get Emily on this ASAP, and give me 24 hours in there before anyone else tries the switch. Send… I don't know. Make Darling and Em sort out who comes after me, but give me a full day."

Jesse leapt over the bannister quickly before Raya could ask anything else, cushioned her own fall with just a pulse of levitation. She barely managed that, the drag of rainbow across her skin had a sensation, distracting like sandpaper on a sunburn. She leaned forward into it. 

Every step forward was a challenge: her legs and body moved without difficulty, but her mind was telling her she was fighting against a headwind, swimming against a current. She had intended to drag the prone agents to the edges of the room so someone could help them, but as she approached the first one she saw grey matter mixed with the blood dripping from their ears. Jesse didn't spare the moment to mourn them, she didn't have the luxury. She didn't picture Darling, and Em, and Simon there. A wave of blur obscured a fallen agents face, making them nameless, anyone, and she had to drag her eyes away to glare at the Pyramid. 

Once she was under the tip of the Pyramid, pulling the cord was easy, so easy, like the eye of a hurricane.

She emerged into Oceanview with her gun drawn and was damn grateful. The shuffling monstrosity in front of her was facing away when she arrived, but it could feel her presence, she knew. It turned, slowly, drawing limbs to its chest, pivoting on the ball of a surprisingly human foot, and stared down the length of the long hall at Jesse.

Jesse knew there were doors on either side of the hall she was standing in, knew there was a door behind her even. But the consistent un-openable nature of the doors on her end of the hall made it feel like she was in a terrible gauntlet, a lone fish in a barel, with no escape from the only other occupant of the hotel.

It was at the end of the other hallway, fifty feet of corridor between them. It had too many teeth, in rows, blunt and human. It had too many arms, short, grasping things mostly, only one pair long enough to reach anything. The short ones reminded her of mandibles, to rip prey apart once it got too close- That was all she noticed before the thing charged. 

Jess felt trapped, felt like the surging tide of horror was going to sprint through those fifty feet and pin her to the walls of her tomb. An instinct from fighting the Hiss demanded space, a place to jump from, to, she wanted an open ceiling, wanted to levitate the fuck out of her skin. Jesse felt her feet pounding the floor as she charged back without even thinking, meeting the monster in the slightly more open lobby between the two mirrored hallways.

Jesse unloaded round after round as she approached, until the Service Weapon buzzed against her hand uselessly, angry at her demands of more. She slowed it, succeeded only in knocking it out of the lobby and a few steps down the opposite hallway, but that was enough. She had space to move, space to fight. With her offhand Jesse clenched a fist and launched a cigarette machine, lamp, even the fucking sofa into the things face. It fell back by half steps, until it was the one trapped in a locked hallway.

The thing flailed, screamed, bellowed in sounds almost like words. Jesse really did not want to hear any new words, so she launched the desk bell into its open mouth. The metallic 'ding' was almost comical. It swallowed the damn thing.

Jesse felt rather than saw it throw something back at her, a near miss, and immediately summoned a debris-sheild to protect herself. She peered out between bits of broken plaster as the thing pulled itself up from under the yellow vinyl of the sofa she had pinned it to the end of the hall with. It was dripping red not-blood which glowed in the dim hallway but never spattered on the floor below. One arm seemed to be pinned, and as it turned, trying to extricate itself from the tangle of shredded vinyl and loose cigarette packs, its lifted limbs revealed soft yellow flesh-

Jesse launched the detritus of her sheild at the thing, then unloaded the Service Weapon again, and this time paused when the gun shook empty in her hand. The monster at the end of the hall was slumped over the chair now, and the red dripping was worse. Jesse approached, gun raised, and took a closer look at the thing. It had too many eyes, all red. The slit gashes of its nose were in triplicate, and one set of short hands had-

"A fucking manicure?"

As Jesse said it, the thing melted into a rainbow glow, a splashed afterimage of violence she could blink away. The nails had been painted black, she thought, but it was gone, no way to be sure. In its place a single key rested on the carpet, with its usual plastic keychain of a black pyramid.

There was no trace of red light that she could find.

Jesse checked all the numbered doors in the hallway, but none opened. With the desk bell missing along with the monster, she thought that would need to be good enough. 

The lobby looked destroyed, but otherwise normal. The front door did not budge.

Finally Jesse paced back to the other hall, and examined the doors with symbols, and there finally felt a shiver of dread. Claw marks marred the walls here, shallow enough but still noticeably there. Jesse traced the gouged and flaking paint, as it led in an obvious trail coming from the door with the Black Pyramid to the door marked with what looked like two C's.

It had come from the House, and it had wanted out. It had come from her House, Jesse thought, and if it had gotten out it would have been her fault.

She double checked the hotel before using the key, then lightswitch, to return home.

When she looked up, Simon had a gun trained on where she had arrived in the middle of Central Executive. 

"Director Faden" he said, not lowering it even a millimeter.

"For fucks sake, Simon, how many times do I have to tell you to all me Jesse?"

"Sorry ma'am, yes ma'am!" Simon joked, and lowered the handgun. "Good to have you back Jesse."

"Darling?" Jesse didn't intend to ask, but there it was.

"He's with Em in the boardroom behind you," Simon walked out from behind the flipped table he'd been aiming at her over. "The miasma, or whatever you want to call it, stopped about two hours ago. We checked on the agents that had called in the central area here, they. They didn't make it." 

Jesse kept her face neutral. She'd known, she'd seen the grey matter, but she'd still hoped that she was wrong.

Simon went on, "Emily and Casper had the bodies moved to the boardroom, to examine them quickly in case they could tell us anything and we needed to go in after you." An agent approached, obviously waiting to update Arish. Jesse waved her hand dismissively.

"Thanks Simon, I'll go- wait. The miasma stopped two hours ago?" Jesse blinked, looked around.

"Yes ma'am."

"Simon, how long was I gone?"

"Six hours, Jesse. Why?" Simon looked suspicious, but his hand didn't even twitch toward his gun. Jesse appreciated that.

"Seemed like less… Thank you," Jesse waved him off and quickly walked into the boardroom before he could ask anything more.

The room seemed almost too familiar as Jesse came in, too much like home. Emily was standing at the table, looking over some paperwork. Beyond her was Darling, his hair a ruffled mess. Jesse wanted to touch it. Neither of the scientists looked up for a moment, letting Jesse take in the rest of the room.

Charts covered two whiteboards, and three boxes of files were open, papers strewn absolutely everywhere on the table. Everywhere not occupied by the three bodies on the cement slab. 

The agents, the dead agents, their faces had been covered. Jess could see that from the doorway. As she approached the table, she saw that one had a blanket mostly over them, another a suit jacket. One had a labcoat, and once she was within ten feet she could tell from the ink stains on one cuff that it was Darling's own labcoat.

The conversation had stopped as she approached the table, Jesse noticed that now and turned from looking at the bodies to the scientists.

"Good to have you back, Jesse," Emily said, flipped shut the file she'd been holding. She hardly paused before going on, "Well Darling, that's that, then: we won't need to send Simon in after her. I'm going to check in with him now, would you catch Jesse up on our findings? Director." 

Emily had nodded once at Jesse then was gone. Damn her for getting so good at reading a room.

"You're okay."

"I'm fairly certain that's my line," Darling replied, as he walked around the table. Jesse looked back down to the agent before her rather than at the way he looked in his dress shirt, tie loosened.

"Did you have an HRA on?"

"No."

Jesse squeezed shut her eyes for a moment, angry all over again. "Could you feel it?"

"Yes," Darling was beside her now, a step back, giving her space. "It was unpleasant, but manageable. Then you were gone, the- Polaris was gone and it was. It was worse."

Jesse looked over, saw his bloodshot eyes, finally noticed his shaky hands. She offered her wrist, wordlessly.

Darling's fingers were so gentle, cradling her hand for a moment as he looked her in the eye. Jesse didn't move, didn't blink, just met his gaze. She wasn't sure what he was looking for. When he finally took her pulse, listened for whatever background noise only she gave off, Jesse thought they both sighed. He released her arm a moment later, and she withdrew her hand, and the room was too silent.

"These agents, they were dead when I went in," Jesse said, finally. 

"Yes. It seems too intense an exposure caused a failure in-"

"I fought a… Thing. Hiss. It had black nail polish on one set of hands," Jesse gestured at the agent before her, at the black manicured nails. 

"One set?" Darling asked, sounded confused. 

"There were three. Three agents, three sets of hands, teeth, eyes on one monster. Also, I was only in there for half an hour, not six."

"Only a half-!"

"Work with Emily, get me a theory. Something killed my agents, used their forms, and it tried to claw open another door in the Hotel, to another Threshold. We let this thing into our universe, we cannot let it escape to another," Jesse walked away without looking back.

Jesse didn't hear Darling try to stop her, but she couldn't be sure he didn't say something: all she could hear was her own pulse pounding with frustration in her own ears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was such a fun chapter to write. Oh man, it may be a little all over the place but GOD IT WAS FUN. So Dylan is still my main plot, but this was really quite a hoot. Hopefully I did the fight justice while keeping it short and keeping the blocking at least understandable. 
> 
> Crits/comments/corrections are so amazing, I adore them and you all for just reading.


	5. Chapter 5

Dylan finally saw the green flash from the end of a sunset while he was sitting on top of a mountain north of Winnemucca. It wasn't as impressive as he'd been hoping it would be, but not much about this trip had lied up to his expectations thus far. He was tired, overheated, his thighs and butt actually hurt from how hot the hood of the car was where he was sitting on it, and if that wasn't a final metaphor for this desert he didn't know what was: it was hot and unpleasant all the time, and if you tried to relax it made you suffer. Nevada was growing on him.

Dylan had been driving the VW for a week, and had been in Winnemucca for three days. He had immediately been charmed by the town when, on his way down main street, two men had stumbled out the front door of a bar and directly into the path of his car at the very reasonable time of five in the morning. Joe and DK had still been very drunk when they scrambled up from the pavement, and had explained that if he would just get them to their job north of town they would give him fifty bucks. DK couldn't remember where the men had parked his truck before going into the bar last night, but had pulled out a fifty dollar bill to prove that he could pay for a ride in Dylan's car. When Dylan had agreed and drove the men to a drill rig off the freeway they'd thanked him, and offered him another hundred to stay and haul bags of mud and rocks around a drill site all day. That night John had offered an incredibly tired Dylan the sofa of his shitty trailer and a free beer.

Dylan had settled in just a little bit, but kept most of his belongings in the VW still. He had a bag now, just a backpack really, filled with clean clothing and sunscreen and bug spray and deodorant and a too-soft toothbrush. Right now the bag was jammed behind the driver's seat, out of the sun so nothing in it would overheat and pop. He had learned his lesson the first time he washed shampoo out of the bottom of the bag in a truck stop bathroom. The front seat of the VW had a paper grocery bag and a styrofoam cooler jammed down on the passenger's side, both filled with a variety of prepackaged food and drink.

Now, in the after-sunset haze, Dylan reached into the front seat, fished around, then snagged a bottle of water. It had been refilled a few times, the paper label peeling and the plastic dented. It was warm, not even lukewarm, just warm. He drank most of it in three gulps: he had let himself get dehydrated just once, the first day of working with DK and Joe, and hadn't made the mistake since. Dylan was considering staying in town for a bit, since he was getting used to the desert in small ways.

He was getting used to the idea of sunsets, for a while at least. Of bar-hopping with Joe and DK maybe, of driving out to the drill rig, maybe following the guys over to Elko this winter for a job DK said he had lined up. Something that involved sharp sticks and finding GPS coordinates in the middle of nowhere. Joe could run a backhoe, he was staying here for some other job, so DK needed the help. It wasn’t like Dylan had any other plans and the guys were, well. He supposed they were okay enough. Dylan had been out here long enough to recognized that his social skills were all kinds of fucked up from growing up in the House, but these guys didn't seem to have very high standards for social skills.

So Dylan had watched the sunset, finally saw the green flash, then leaned back to lay across the hood of the car and watch the stars come out. It was a nice way to spend an evening. Would have been nicer if he hadn't been covered in a dusty layer of salt from sweating in the sun and fighting heavy equipment all day, but still. Nice.

The sky was barely becoming hazy when Dylan abruptly remembered that he never really had the patience for stargazing as a kid, and he realized that hadn't changed with age.

"Well this is boring," he announced to the scuffling sound of what he assumed was a rabbit in the underbrush. As Dylan turned, he saw a glimmer of green at the horizon, just where the sun had disappeared. He had only caught it from the corner of one eye, and now paused, facing the mountain, the last trace of western sunset just a pink glow in his peripheral vision.

There was no green.

The jackrabbit ran off into the scrub brush, he thought he heard it scream, he didn’t know rabbits could scream-

The green had shimmered.

He had imagined it. He felt too damn hot, like he had just stepped into a sauna.

Dylan drove too fast, back to the trailer outside of town where he was staying. He slammed the car door as he stepped out of it, snarling at the local dog that barked at him as he juggled his cooler and the paper bag.

"Fuck off!"

Inside the trailer was empty, and Dylan assumed the other occupants were at the local bar. He'd paid John a hundred bucks to stay for the week on that battered sofa, and John was probably out drinking that hundred now. John would roll out of his greasy bed tomorrow and look for Dylan, assuming they would drive to the drill rig an hour to the north, and would find Dylan gone and- 

Dylan kicked open the fridge and filled his cooler with John's beer. Almost as an afterthought he added the few candy bars and the salt shaker, just to fuck with the guy. After a minute of thought he wrote the word “thanks” on the bathroom mirror with the corner of the bar soap. He dropped the bag of beer into the back seat.

An hour later Dylan was well on his way to Idaho, thinking he’d spend the night in Boise somewhere and head to Canada after that. He didn’t have a passport, but then again he didn’t have a driver’s license either. He’d figure something out.

The road was dark, and even with the windows down the night air was hot. He was suddenly sick to death of the desert: he was tired of being hot, tired of the scratchy layer of salt that would build up on his arms and neck, tired of warm bottles of tap water, and tired of canned food. He should never have stayed this long. 

It was in Idaho that he saw it, slammed on the breaks, let the cat fish tail wildly in the gravel off the highway. He stared ahead, not looking in the rearview mirror. Not acknowledging the green light in the back seat.

"I am so sick of this shit."

The green light hitting the dashboard and roof of the car rippled like water.

"Why."

The light didn't waiver. He turned in his seat, dug through the bag, found the salt shaker with its green aura. He held it in his palm for a moment, stared at the cut glass, the chip in the edge. Joe had probably stolen this from a local restaurant, Dylan thought. Joe was the kind of guy who would think it was actually funny that Dylan had stolen his salt shaker and beer but not the handgun and cash under the mattress. Joe would get the joke.

Dylan felt his cheeks crease with a smile, and it sobered him, spoiled his thoughts like a handful of maggots. He threw the salt shaker out the car window and drove away, spraying gravel from his back tires. He saw that the glow didn't appear in his rearview mirrors.

"I know it wasn't the salt shaker. I know," he cursed, hit the steering wheel, swerved over the yellow line and back into his lane. "What the fuck do you want?! What the hell did you ever want? Are you even fucking real?"

There was no light, no reply, nothing.

Dylan slept in a parking lot behind a mall, but only for an hour until a security guard rapped on the passenger window.

"Can't sleep here man, you gotta go," the guard said. He looked bored, old, tired. Bitter.

"Yeah," Dylan sat up, rubbed his eyes.

"You can't sleep here-"

"Yeah," Dylan was still blinking at the steering wheel, he couldn't quite-

"You gotta-" the guard's hand was rapping on the glass again.

"I fucking heard you!" Dylan snapped, saw red, glared over at the guard and- 

The old man was frozen, mouth open like he wanted to scream but was unable to make a noise. His hand was bent backward by some invisible force, each finger bowed and twitching and blanching the skin to pale, muscles twitching in the man's arm. It looked painful, it looked like his skin was about to split and rupture, it looked like he wanted to scream but couldn't even remember how.

Dylan blinked and the moment ended, the man dropped to his knees, fingers at a normal angle, bones not broken. Dylan drove away fast, leaving the guard sitting on the asphalt and staring at his hands.

He hadn't meant that. He'd always meant to do it, before, and this time he hadn't-

Dylan drove until dawn, and found himself someplace with a river past a sign saying he was in Nez Perce county. He slept for longer this time, in the car behind a laundromat. When he woke up he went in and washed his spare clothes, sorted through his supplies while they dried. Afterward he changed into clean clothes in the laundromat bathroom. On his way out of the building he left the bag of beer and candy bars near where an old man was napping leaned up against a dryer.

Back in the car Dylan pulled the largest water bottle out of his cooler and jammed it into his backpack. He left the cooler and the keys in the car, and walked away with just his backpack and fifty dollars in his pocket. He was fairly sure it was the exact same bill that DK had given him just last week, and that felt strange somehow. 

It took a few days hitchhiking out of Lewiston to find a truck he could take into Canada. Dylan was sure leaving the US would be simpler than coming back, but he wasn't totally convinced that he ever would come back. Maybe he'd become a lumberjack. Maybe he'd be eaten by a bear. So many options. 

He stowed away in the flatbed to get over the border, surprised when it worked. He broke the fifty dollar bill at a gas station to get ice cream and postcards, then borrowed a pen from the bored teenage cashier. Dylan had finished the It's-It entirely by the time he handed the pen back.

"This is headed to New York, uh, does it need any extra postage or anything?" Dylan tried to look bland while not smiling. He still hadn't worked out how to form any kind of smile which people reacted well to. 

The teen looked at the cards, eyed the postage, "This'll work. You from New York?"

Dylan shook his head, trying to think of where to say he was from. He was so busy thinking about if he should say Ordinary or Winnemucca that he didn't really notice how strange it was when he actually said, "No, that's just where my family is."

The water of a local hot spring stared up from the back of one postcard, shimmering forever in a photo of concentric blue ripples.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear this is the last time you'll have to grind through a semi-rambling chapter about Dylan being an idiot. Hopefully. I swear there's a plot I'm getting to, but lord it's easier to write Darling/Jesse drama than it is to write Dylan experiencing human emotions.
> 
> Crits/comments/corrections are always very welcome!


	6. Chapter 6

Casper had packed two bags, set them on the floor, then sat on the foot of the bed and stared at them. After a minute of quiet deliberation he pushed his glasses up his forehead and ground the heels of his palms into his eyes until his view was just splotchy magenta.

"Okay. Alright. This situation is probably not precisely what the HR department had in mind when they said that dating ones coworkers was a bad idea, but I certainly think that, in retrospect, this is a perfect example of why inter-office romances are, by and large, frowned upon," Darling fell back onto the bed.

The perfectly made bed he hadn't been sleeping on because he'd been sleeping on the sofa just in case Jesse came back one night and needed to crash here but wanted him absolutely nowhere near her.

"Alright."

He glanced to the left, to where Jesse had left a pair of grey underwear hanging from the drawer, a pair that he had really rather liked when he had seen them, had picked up, had imagined on her, then had promptly tucked back into the drawer for the time being, thinking that maybe her next boyfriend would get to see them on Jesse because he certainly wasn't going to get to, not a chance-

"Okay!"

Casper sat up, stood, straightened the comforter where he'd wrinkled it from flopping all over the place like an angsty teen.

He laughed to himself, shook his head, "I'm too old for this!" But then the quiet of the room made the words seem less funny, more foreboding. Yes, he was, he really was too god damn old for this.

Casper tucked his dress shirt in from where his dramatics had tugged it loose. He walked to the bathroom, shaved, straightened his tie. Yesterday's tie, yesterday's shirt. He quickly changed both, then picked up only one of the bags from the bedroom floor. Weighed it. Considered it. Double checked that is was the bag full of Jesse's clothing.

"Well then, I'll be right back," he said to the other duffle bag, then he shut the front door and locked it.

Walking the few blocks to the House seemed to take longer than normal. An unbidden thought arrived: perhaps he would be struck by a bus on the way to the House and need not worry about what the right choice is/was/had been. He would be hit, and the story would be an old man walking downtown with a duffle bag full of women's clothing died and how undignified, grey lace panties and blood in the Thomas street traffic.

Casper realized he was grinning and tried to reign in his amusement. 

Honestly, this whole thing would have been so much easier if he thought that what he had done was wrong, or if he thought Jesse was in the wrong. He hadn't been, and she wasn't now. That was a sobering thought, amusement successfully squashed. 

When he'd been young, Casper had believed that love alone surely had to be enough to make any relationship work. It hadn't been enough to make his own marriage a happy one, though perhaps he hadn't been particularly in love with Michelle by the end. She certainly hadn't been in love with him, or whatever ghost of himself he had left for her when he devoted too much of his life to the Bureau. Nonetheless, they tried for a long time to make it work through sheer willpower.

He hadn't really stopped believing, though, that love would fix anything. Not for a while. Not until Zach and his wife Kate had ended things. The only person Zach have ever love more than Kate was their Suzie, and-

Casper hadn't been particularly close to the man then, when he was still Zach (and not even Zachariah, definitely not Trench). More had changed than just the man's title when he became Director. Darling and Zach had been friendly, if not close friends, though back then even a stranger could see Zach's priorities laid out in the picture frames on his desk. After Suzie, Zach was just gone and Trench was there, and this new man somehow had become one of Casper's only friends.

And then eventually Casper and Michelle had admitted that they hadn't been in love for years, and so what was there to save, really?

After that, after Trench had found Casper in the office too late for justification just one too many times, after they had run into each other shaving in the men's restroom too many mornings, then the two men had become closer. Trench had assumed they had a shared history, that Darling had a failed marriage, a sad story in the same way Trench had. Casper didn't really, he had just exited stage-left while no one was looking. Sometimes things fell apart, sometimes they just faded away. Still, Casper had been too polite to refuse the late night drinks and bonding over heartbreak with his only friend. 

And Casper really had been heartbroken: that a man like Trench, who had devoted his life to the FBC and kept his nose to the grindstone for years trying to just give his family the things he thought they deserved, could lose everything. And that love wasn't enough? That was heartbreaking. That was the kind of tragedy men like them simply couldn't speak of, could only drink about late at night in dark offices, in the same room but both alone. Until Casper had fucked up, and because of that Trench had found other friends, multidimensional friends, secret and dangerous friends that had eaten the man away from the inside, and had the dimensia come before or after the Hiss, was is Caspers fault, he had let Trench come on expidition three, and so- 

So-

So here was the House, and Casper across the street, and he was only carrying one bag full of only Jesse's clothing, and he knew that even though neither of them was right or wrong Jesse wouldn't forgive him and he wouldn't apologize.

He crossed the street, did not get hit by a bus, and was mildly bitter about it as he entered the building. 

One flash of his badge got him through security without a bag check (which he was supremely grateful for) then he was glancing between the photos on either side of the elevator as he waited for it to arrive. One was Jesse, and the other still Trench. Casper wondered if Pope hadn't wanted the portrait, if she had wanted to be left out of the limelight. Maybe Jesse didn't want to show favoritism for her Head of Research over the other heads. Casper had the thought, 'Maybe I'm just so clever I'm a hard act to follow,' then snorted out loud. He glanced around, no one near, then turned back to glare at himself in the mirrored surface of the elevator doors. Clever was the problem here at the FBC. Maybe Pope knew better than to let her ego destroy her. He hoped.

Maybe the bus could still manage to kill him somehow, but no, damn, there was the elevator.

Casper stepped off in Executive and walked straight down the long hall to Jesse's office. Or, he had intended to, was mentally picturing it now: he could drop off the bag, explain that he wasn't staying, wrap up a few things in the lab, and give Lex a pep talk before leaving.

"Doctor Darling, thank goodness I caught you, I need your opinion on this sample," Raya was immediately to his right, and had a petri dish literally in her hand.

"Doctor Underhill, would you, ah, give me a moment?" Casper looked down the hall to the door of the Director's office. This would be easier if he stuck to the plan.

"I really can't, Darling: I need this sample identified as a fruiting body or not before the lockdown hits. I need to determine if the mold is about to spread, and if I need inoculated Rangers, and this if Andy is staying on as a guard for the lower levels or headed back home, and if he is staying he needs to have his roommate pack him a bag, or some nonsense," Raya sniffed. "Honestly why he didn't have an emergency bag packed just in case I don't know, but I suppose I should be grateful that he offered to stay at all."

Casper blinked slowly, glancing again down the hall beyond Raya. Her words made almost no sense and he almost didn't care, but this was Raya. He tried to focus.

"I have a sneaking suspicion you hadn't planned on staying yourself: I promise not to keep you long, you'll be out of here with time to spare. It's only nine in the morning now and you have until five pm for goodness sake," Raya smiled, and Casper relented.

"Of course Raya, where are you working?"

"I have a little space in an office Emily borrowed down the hall, just as a base of operation for the team that's staying," and she indeed led him to a room off the top floor of Central Executive where a few duffle bags were piled and a frazzled Emily was directing several agents who were moving crates.

"Darling! Good to see you! I know your team is small, did you have a logistics plan for the staff? I mean it's just you and Lex, right? You can add your bags to our pile: it'll all end up in Research!" Then Emily turned, before Casper could reply, "Simon! I need to talk food allergies for the staff, do you have the list?"

"What list?" Simon said from right next to Casper's ear, and when exactly had the younger man gotten so comfortable with him as to hover that way? Simon clapped a hand on Casper's shoulder. "Good to have you Doc!"

"The allergens list for Operations, the one with the list of foods that will kill staffers,” Pope blinked, totally unflustered.  
“Right, yes, I have a copy here. There's also a copy with the guys moving the food crates in from the subway tunnels. I made a couple dozen copies just in case."

"Oh, we forgot to add beer to the supply list!"

"Well… We don't need-"

"It's really more for morale than need. Would you be willing to go clear out a grocery store?" Emily asked, and Simon just nodded. She turned to Casper, "I don't suppose we could borrow your car, Doctor Darling?"

"What?! I'm sorry, you want to borrow itl? The hatchback is held shut with a bungee cord after whatever the hell it was you two did to the lock! And now you want to ask my-" The words were out before Casper even realized he was speaking, then he paused. Breathed deeply. "Okay. Alright. Well lucky for us all I actually gave it away recently, to someone who will use it more. And who luckily didn't care about broken locks."

The two had the good grace to look at least a little abashed.

"Well Simon, would you mind picking up a few cases of beer, maybe whatever they have at the liquor store on the corner of 3rd street?" Emily had turned to Simon, who looked downright relieved to have a reason to exit the room. “We’ll keep it on hand for special occasions.”

"Can do. Back soon!"  
Raya tugged gently at Casper’s sleeve, and pulled him to a quieter corner of the room, where she had a covered tray and microscope set up. He sat, dropping the bag next to him, trying to calm his heart. Everyone was moving a mile a minute.  
“I don’t recall any op ever being this efficient before,” Casper muttered at the slide in front of him. He breathed the rancid mold-air shallowly, glanced into the microscope, made a note. Glanced in again, made a correction. And three hours later Raya was calling his name.  
“Casper. Casper. Lunch,” She had a sports drink in one hand, offering it to him.  
“Oh, thank you, I- What time is it?”  
“Noon. You still have time to get out of here before the lockdown hits, don’t worry,” Raya sighed, and Caper supposed she was sighing at him. She shook her head, blinked, seemed to resign herself to whatever that sigh meant, “Well?”  
“I can’t be sure, but yes, it does indeed look like a fruiting body. I think you’re probably seeing some advance phases of a bloom, or at least a change in growth behavior. Andy will need to stay, if he’s still willing,” Casper drank his blue flavored sugar water and grimaced.  
“Unless you want to march around with a Lewis gun all day..?” Raya was smiling.  
“No thank you, Doctor Underhill, I think I’ve smelled quite enough of that rank fungus for a lifetime! I should take this to Jesse," Casper stood, looked around for the bag.  
“I had a courier run it to the Director’s office, I hope you don’t mind,” Raya spoke quietly.  
“No, that’s perfect. Thank you. I’m not sure-”

Raya raised a hand, palm out, a near universal signal for 'wait' or 'be quiet.' Or, for Raya, a gentle way to say 'kindly shut the fuck up.'

"Not that you asked me, but you should stay. You've unique experience and insight with the resonances related to this Hiss, and you know it."

"I didn't ask Raya, you're right. Jesse managed fine on her own last time-"

"Because you left her the video equivalent of breadcrumbs-" Raya only raised a brow when he scoffed at that. "Fine, love letters in every third room!"

"Love letters?"

"Call them whatever you want, you utter ass of a man, she didn't manage the Slide Projector alone," Raya was almost smiling. Almost.

"You're right: Emily was here to help her-"

"What matters more Casper, whatever you two are having a spat about or you being here to help during the lockdown?"

"Well if Jesse had been home this week I might have asked her,” he heard the venom in his voice. 

Raya blinked, she obviously hadn't realized that the Director has been staying in the House. Her previously amused tone had vanished and now she looked pensive.

They stood, and he wondered what exactly Raya thought he had done to warrant this. Did she think he was unfaithful, that he lied to Jesse, that he- Casper found he didn't care. It didn't matter, particularly. He had done something Jesse was terribly upset about and felt betrayed by. And he couldn't regret it. At least Raya wasn't asking him what he'd done.

"It's not just a spat," Raya said, not asking really.

"No."

"Pity, I'd hoped- well. Perhaps you'll work it out," Raya moved her hand, like she wanted to pat his shoulder or something equally comforting. She did not. Casper was appreciative.

"We may… I've upended her personal life, Raya. Don't I owe her some refuge?"

"Jesse knew what she was doing when she asked you to move in," Raya shrugged like that settled it. "You both need to cope with the repercussions of your own actions. Jesse certainly doesn't need you trying to protect her: she's a grown woman, Casper. Perhaps you'd forgotten."

He realized his mouth was open, ready to snap back at Raya, but- He replayed her words, weighing them. Was that what he'd been doing?

As he mulled, Casper realized Raya was still leaning against the desk, looking very casual and nonchalant. Like she didn't care that he was tired and frustrated. All he could smell was the rot of the mold he'd been staring at for hours.

"I'll try to talk to her," he finally said.

"I mean there's no rush, you have several whole hours," Raya's joke was dry, but not unfair. He had put this off too long.

Casper nodded, cleared his throat, had every intention of agreeing with Raya now, and leaving the House as soon as possible. While everyone else was in lockdown he could clean the apartment up, move his belongings out, and that way Jesse would have her place back to herself. Casper stared at a swirl in the wood paneling of the office, wondering where he would go. Leaving meant losing his home, job, career… But it was why he had packed the other duffle bag, wasn't it? Even if he hadn't realized it at the time.

"Simon, would you come over here a moment?" Jesse's voice cut through the room, and Casper looked up. He realized that somehow all the department heads had ended up in this makeshift office, and here was Jesse in the doorway. She looked tired and gorgeous. Her hair was an absolute wreck and he tried not to smile. She'd probably been washing it with hand soap again.

"I won't keep you very long. As you know, we're entering back into voluntary lockdown at five pm this evening, and we don't know exactly how long this will last. When I came here it was as a reactionary measure, and we tried to clean up a mess we hadn't anticipated. Now we're working through an extermination: we know what we're up against and we are going to clean house, until every trace of Hiss is gone from this building. And from anyplace attached to the building," Jesse paused, looked around. She made eye contact with all of them, and Casper could see she was trying to remember how the heck a strong leader ought to sound. She was nervous. He didn't know how to help, wanted to fix this, to say the right thing, maybe a joke… He thought of Raya's words, glared at the floor, and kept his mouth shut.

"Thank you all for staying. We all know what an extended lockdown looks like now, and it's not exactly a vacation. I appreciate that every one of you here decided to do this again. This time, we're staying until the Hiss are eradicated, and thanks to you all I'm confident that is indeed possible," Jesse smiled, relaxed just a little. "That being said, I'm expecting daily updates from all department Heads, even if there's nothing to report in about! Every staff member wears an HRA at all times, no one goes anywhere alone. We know what we're getting into this time, and it's going to be a fight, but I have complete confidence in our team."

"We're all glad to be here with you, Director!" Simon was grinning, an enthusiastic puppy. Casper caught Emily rolling her eyes at the man, and repressed a smirk. At least she knew what an idiot he was and like him anyway, that was good. Far better than her just not seeing it.

They really would be fine, with or without him, the whole staff would be. He wasn't worried, he wasn't-

"Darling? A word in my office," Jesse spoke from his left and Casper blinked. 

"Of course," he said, not looking at Raya, and fell in behind Jesse as she left.

The walk was a thousand miles of bland carpeted silence. Casper tried to compose something to say, he tried a few apologies out in his head, none felt genuine. He wasn't sorry, he wasn't actually at all sorry about sending Dylan off alone. At the end of the hall Jesse held the door to her office open for him, then once she had closed it behind them she passed him to sit at her desk. Casper stood, fiddling with his cuff, trying not to say anything at all. She would tell him to sit if he needed to. He hoped.

"Darling," Jesse stared at her desk for a long minute, obviously just as out of sorts as he was. She wasn't yelling, so this was going well. Eventually she pulled a piece of cardstock from under a folder, a postcard.

A photo of a cactus with snow on it. Casper took the card, flipped it over, and read out loud-

"Darling- Sold your POS car, you're welcome. It's warm here, and the pizza is good. D," Casper snorted. "It's an improvement on the smiley faces I suppose."

Jesse held up another card, with a grumpy looking ground owl on it and read, "Jesse- Did they change Funyuns? Also, why is it so hard to find music on cassette tapes? Gonna sell this damn car." She set down the postcard, "Mine is post dated a day before yours, but they both arrived today. Sorry about your car."

"Somehow I think I'll live. The trunk didn't close anymore anyway," Casper waved a hand, realized he was still holding his postcard, then slipped it into his back pocket.

The room was very quiet. Moments like this were why Casper was so convinced the House was mostly underground, this was the quiet of underground. A cave. A grave.

"I'm glad you're here," Jesse spoke, abruptly. She stood, pushed her chair in, watched him as he shifted his weight and wondered what he meant. "I'm not ready to talk about it yet, honestly we don't have time, and honestly I want a damn fistfight and I know that's not... Anyway. I need you here, for the lockdown. Thank you for coming."

"Of course Jesse," Casper blinked at her, realizing he'd spoken only after the words were out. The next words were easy, "I'm happy to be here."

"You did miss most of the last lockdown," Jesse was smiling, walking to the door. He followed a step behind.

"I missed two weeks," he replied, holding the door for her this time.

"Yeah, but it was the worst two weeks. You got off easy," she looked at him. "We have four hours to deadline. I have to go check the loading docks, I'll… I'll see you later, Darling."

He nodded, and she was off in the direction of the Raya and Executive. Casper looked around, saw the elevator at the end of the hall.

"Shit!" And then he was jogging down the hall, punching the call button frantically. He had to go home and get his bag and be back as soon as humanly possible, because he really did not want to spend another lockdown washing his hair in some bathroom sink with hand soap.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter got longer than I could comfortably keep in my brain and edit, so I have to be done. I can generally give a chapter a review for copy edit purposes pretty well (read: not well at all) up to a point, but sometimes I have trouble with reviewing the plot and theme and tone. :/ My brain is smol, like burd. 
> 
> Anywho, just finished The Foundation! It was great! I have no current plans to work that into this series, I just can't think of how to make that work with what's going on here with Dylan and Casper and the lockdown.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dylan meets some new people and kills a few of them. Now featuring- young Casper Darling for like literally 10 seconds in a flashback!

The green minivan had been following Dylan through British Columbia for three days. Dylan had parked his newly purchased Lincoln towncar outside a Safeway and wandered the small shopping mall with hands in his pockets. He was considering selling the car, or walking away from it altogether, just to see what the green minivan did then. 

Dylan mimed kicking a rock, used a burst of power to launch it away just before his foot hit. The rock skittered on the cement, struck against a curb. He was getting better at this, better at controlling his strength. It was incredibly satisfying.

"Anything you can do, I can do," he muttered.

Ahead of him the now-still rock made an audible cracking noise, as if in reply. He ignored it.

Dylan made up his mind, went into the Safeway and bought a few essentials. Tortillas, jerky, bag of apples, a six pack of cola. Paid in stolen bills that he'd had yanked out of a conveniently-busted-open ATM he "found" two towns back.

He filled up the tank of his car, then filled up two red jerrycans as stealthily as he could, keeping them low to the ground and near the pump. The green van was nowhere to be seen, but he was sure it was still around, somewhere. Maybe if he drove long enough without stopping in a town for gas he would lose them. At the least it might frustrate them, which would be amusing if nothing else.

And 18 hours later somewhere outside of Vancouver he realized it hadn't worked. His pursuers had been nowhere in sight for most of the drive, and Dylan had parked a few blocks away from his hotel before checking in for the night. He had walked two blocks to a diner, ate meatloaf for dinner, then took a long stroll around the neighborhood before bed. The green van was parked behind a billboard down the street.

They weren't following his car, they were tracking him somehow. 

Upon enter the hotel Dylan immediately closed the blinds, turned the television on, and set an alarm for three hours ahead, which turned out to be a little past ten pm. He turned the TV volume down low and slept until the alarm buzzed by his ear, then sat up and turned the television off entirely. He ran the shower for a few minutes before finally turning out the last of the lights and sitting in the lone chair near the door. Anyone listening would think he'd watched bad sitcoms all night, then showered and gone to bed. It wasn't high espionage but it might work.

He waited until dawn but the room stayed silent: his visitors never came. He watched the sun rise through thick curtains, then watched the dark television for a few minutes and finally stood, set his alarm for thirty minutes before the 10am checkout time, and fell back to sleep on top of the blankets. 

The next day Dylan ate lunch in a park, picking chunks of chicken salad out of a gas station sandwich and flicking them to the local crows. After lunch he bought a package of cigarettes, tried to learn to like the brand he could get out here. Dylan had learned to smoke by stealing cigarettes off of Darling's desk, a small trespass he thought the scientist had probably noticed and ignored. He had been allowed little acts of rebellion.

Dylan assumed the green van was harmless for the moment: if they hadn't tried to black-bag him in the middle of the night thus far then they must have been waiting for something. Some change in them, not him.

Two days later after driving through Seattle the green van became a red SUV and Dylan guessed that was the alteration they'd been waiting for: reinforcements. He didn't quite have the cash for another hotel, so he would need to change tactics for tonight. Dyllan Dylan the towncar left at a roadsign for Bright Falls, then headed into the Cascade mountains until he thought he was in the middle of nowhere. He knew this area from FBC reports at least, Darling had always allowed Dylan to read almost any of the old incident reports he wanted. Sometimes Dylam suspected the more bizarre and non-lethal ones were left around by the doctor on purpose. A test? Who knew.

Dylan pulled onto an unmarked logging road, dirt and gravel loud under his tires, and after a mile turned the car around so it was facing out the way he'd come. He parked on the far side of a small meadow, under the trees. They'd probably park in the road itself at the entrance of the meadow to block him in, but just in case they didn't it was worth pointing the car in the right direction. Maybe he'd get lucky and the idiots would park in the middle of the meadow, and he could drive right past them just off of the road if needed. It wasn't likely.

He thought about staying awake for them, thought about leaving a decoy in the car, tried to form a plan. They'd been tracking him, not his car, so they would probably know if he wasn't in it: no point in a decoy. They weren't hiding their pursuit very well, so either they were idiots (possible) or they genuinely thought they could overpower him. This whole pursuit had none of the professionalism of an FBC operation, so they likely didn't know who he was.

Dylan rolled the windows of the car most of the way up, locked the doors, and fell asleep in the backseat figuring he'd either wake up to a fight or not at all.

It was a chiming, and green light behind his eyes, that finally woke him. The color glowed dim in his peripheral vision as he became conscious, and it felt like the silence after laughter, like someone had just giggled in his ear and he'd woken a moment too late to hear the sound. He lay still in the cold car feeling the bite of the air. It felt icy, like the hour before dawn, and the dashboard clock confirmed the time as a little before six in the morning.

In the distance tires sounded on gravel, an engine in low gear, then both stopped. A car door opened then closed quietly. Hushed voices. They'd parked across the open field, in the tree line. Blocking him in. Not totally incompetent then.

Dylan rolled down the back window and crawled through it and out of the car as silently as possible. He went over the situation one more time as he reached back into the car and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and flashlight. He had no weapons beyond being a parautilitarian. He had no escape path beyond the road his pursuers were currently blocking. He had no way of hiding as they were apparently able to tell where he was, probably paranaturally. Dylan sat on the hood of the car and looked up at the moonless sky. The meadow was slightly better lit than the forest under their glittering light, but not much. They'd need to cross the open space to reach him in the treeline.

They walked straight at him on silent feet. He counted two, but he assumed they'd sent someone to flank him along the forest's edge. It's what he would have done, the kind of simple solution Trench had drilled into him: even if someone is your friend, keep something secret. Something only you know. Something to use against them. 

The not-sound was back, the just-after-laughter and it made him amused and unworried. He waited until the pair in the open were about thirty feet out, then casually lit a cigarette.

The figures from the SUV hadn't seen him until then, he could tell because over the hiss and drag of his inhalation he heard the metal click of a gun drawn and a safety flicked off.

Guns. How quaint. It reminded him of home.

"So," Dylan smiled, hoping they could see it in the glow of a lone ember. "My name's Dylan. Nice to finally meet you."

After a beat there was a reply from a smallish figure, "Hello Dylan. I'm agent Meyers"

Dylan snorted out loud, he couldn't help it.

"This is agent Mills," the voice went on. The man sounded like he was trying to be genial, almost paternal, which really made Dylan chuckle: paternal was not a great plan. "We've been looking for you Dylan, we wanted to meet you. You're a very special young man-"

"Jesus Christ, that's what you want to go with? I'm the chosen one or some shit, that's your angle?" Dylan took one long last drag on the cigarette then stubbed it out on the chromed grill on the car.

The second figure, Mills, cocked their gun in an audible unspoken threat. Dylan levitated his dark flashlight silently, keeping it off and in the shadow of the trees beside him. He focused on the little switch on the top, tried to feel the hard plastic, picture the pressure out would take to flick on. The distant plastic felt intimate, felt like the loose itch of empty palms just before a fistfight.

Somewhere to the left a subtle snap of branches: there was the third. Dylan managed to pick out individual pieces of gravel with his thoughts, to lift them a few inches from the ground. A dozen tiny vibrating projectiles waiting to be used around them all, silent. He kept the flashlight about four feet off the ground and moved it to his left, between the two groups of "agents."

"Now Dylan, we have reason to believe you've been in contact with a dangerous object," Meyers was advancing slowly. He had something in his hand-

A light clicked on, not Dylan's. Meyers was pointing his own flashlight at Dylan's feet, leaving a cone of illuminated gravel stretched out between them. The sudden clear appearance of his own feet in the light was what finally made him angry, and he smiled. The two in front of him might just barely be able to see that. 

"We just want to talk," Meyers said soothingly-

Dylan blinked and there was a wave of dizzy green, hyper saturated color, like sun spots in his eyes. Dylan was ten again, standing in his empty house, hoping Mom would come home. Even then he had known she wouldn't. Jesse had told him to pack a bag of clothing, that they were going to go look for Mom and Dad, outside of town. A road trip, she said.

-Meyers was speaking, it sounded like static-

Dylan had packed his favorite sleepover bag, was getting his toothbrush from the bathroom, when he heard the front door open. He'd seen a flash of green. He had thought it was Jesse, coming to tell him to pack faster. The green, the glitter, like a warning, then a voice-

"Hello?"

-Myers was closer, the light was closer-

Dylan had frozen for a moment then tiptoed around the corner of the hallway and saw the man just as the stranger was closing the front door behind himself. A stranger letting himself in. An adult. Dylan must have gasped or made some noise, because the man's head swiveled to look right at him. Dylan stepped back involuntarily as he eyed the man. He was tall, dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, and even though he was dressed like a cop he reminded Dylan of the Computer Science teacher at school.

"My name is Doctor Casper," the man had held up his hands, palms out, obviously trying to calm the boy. "We're here to help… I just want to talk."

-Meyers was close now, and Miller was a shadow next to him, gun drawn. In the quiet Washington forest a branch snapped as the third agent came closer-

Dylan hadn't even thought, had simply sprinted the length of the hall to Casper, thrown his arms around the man, started sobbing. An adult, a doctor. If he had known to look then, he might have seen Jesse nearby, maybe outside looking through a window, maybe even standing in the back doorway just past the kitchen. In his memory Casper was frozen for a moment, then wrapped his arms around the boy.

"It's going to be okay." 

Dylan noticed his jaw ached from where he was gritting his teeth, and several things happened at once. With a kick Dylan leapt into the air, shattering the bulb of the flashlight in Meyers hand with a thought, and at the same moment his feet left the ground. The crack of a gun sounded loud as an explosion, though Dylan didn't feel an impact. He switched on the suspended flashlight he had kept in the treeline, blinding Mills and Meyers with it. Three shots rang out quickly, the second shattering the lens of the flashlight. A quiet wet thump told Dylan that he had indeed managed to keep the light directly between Mills and the third agent in the woods. With his own flashlight now dark the metal and plastic was simply a hanging projectile, and Dylan sent it bouncing off Mills skull with a sickening crunch. They fell.

Meyers dropped his own dead flashlight, a scuffling sound indicating he was reaching for a gun. Even from above the dim light of pre-dawn wasn't quite enough for Dylan to see the man clearly. Dylan gathered the suspended bits of gravel to himself, a cloud of stones waiting in the dark like knocked arrows. 

"You're not an agent of anything, " Dylan said floating directly above Meyers. 

The small man had his gun out, head whipping around to find Dylan in the dark. The sky had lightened slightly, making it just a little more likely that the man might see his shadow, might look up. Dylan landed quietly. It took almost no concentration to feel inside the gun, find the firing pin, wrench it sideways and through the metal. The force wrenched the gun from Meyer's hands as well. 

"You," Dylan took an intentional step on the loose rock, watched the man turn to the sound. "Are a worm."

Meyers said something again, but it was just more static.

Dylan pulled out his cigarettes from a pocket, casually lighting one, letting the glow from the cheap bic lighter illuminate off of the dancing projectiles around his head. It tasted awful. He couldn't see Meyers face past the glow of burning tobacco. 

Dylan launched the stones at the man as he took a drag, the crackle of burning paper not quite drowning out the crunch of blood and bone. After a few seconds Dylan stood alone in the clearing, listening to the birdsong begin and watching the sky lighten as he finished his cigarette.

Mills, on the ground, made a quite noise like they were regaining consciousness. Dylan levitated the agents gun into his own palm, leaned against the hood of his car, and waited patiently for dawn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I was putting off writing and posting because I started to get intimidated and telling myself it's "not good enough" and then I realized... That sucks. :/
> 
> So here's a new chapter! Next chapter Dylan meets "Agent Mills" properly and takes them to Bright Falls for coffee.


	8. Chapter 8

It was the color green that woke her, and she thought maybe it was the grass around her.

For the first ten seconds after she woke up Mills had no idea where she was, she thought it was a lawn. It was a nice few seconds. Then, in quick succession, she had several thoughts-

Why am I outside/Why does my head hurt/Oh my god I shot Williams/I am going to be murdered.

The last thought was the most upsetting somehow, because she didn't want to have regained consciousness only to be killed and the smile of the man who was now leaning over her seemed like an unhinged guarantee of homicide.

"You're not dead," the man said like it was a casual observation, and that also seemed to bode ill. 

Mills felt the head trauma catch up with her, scrambled to her hands and knees, and vomited onto the green grass of the meadow. It took her a minute to come back to her senses after heaving up last night's dinner. She pushed herself up to wobbly feet, spit in the grass, and glared at the man who she thought called himself Dylan. She was pretty sure it was Dylan. He was grinning, holding a gun. Her gun.

"I don't want to die," that was not what she had planned on saying. She'd intended to say something strong, something that might keep her alive. So much for that.

"Okay," he sounded noncommittal and was still grinning. "Who are you?"

"Agent Mills." She stared at the man for a long second after speaking, then felt a wave of exhaustion, bent forward, and held onto her own knees.

"With what agency?"

"I'm not at liberty to-" 

Dylan made a noise that might have been a laugh.

Mills squinted up at him: he had walked back to his car and was sipping water from a very battered plastic bottle. Just the thought of water made her thirsty and nauseous simultaneously. She took a half step forward only to be met with her own gun leveled at her face from a few feet away, and was more pissed off than she expected.

"Okay, fine: we worked for some rich asshole who believes in superpowers and who pays us to imitate feds. I think. My name's Karen. I just spent what seems to have been a few hours unconscious in the woods and puked my guts up and probably have a concussion. Give me water." The anger faded and she bent double again, holding her knees. After a moment a water bottle landed near her feet, and Mills sat back down and tried very hard to take small sips. After a few moments she paused, eyes closed, let her stomach settle. It gave her time to think, and to decide to address what she figured was the most important part of last night. "I never talked to the actual boss, I'm new but… You actually have superpowers don't you? They're real."

"Sure," Dylan's voice was again noncommittal. She glared up at him after a moment. "We don't call them that, but yeah. I can do shit other people can't do, sure."

"Well color me jealous," Mills said, and took another sip of water. She was feeling better now, able to sit up straighter, and noticed her hair was plastered to her forehead with blood. "You gonna kill me?"

Dylan tipped his head from side to side like he was thinking about it. He was smiling like this whole charade amused him, but after just a second of making her sweat he spoke, "Nah, no point." 

She watched him take the gun apart with his hands, so fast it spooked the hell out of her: this guy was painfully familiar with firearms. Even without superpowers they'd never stood a chance. She realized that it was a bit of theatrics, which meant that Dylan could kill her without the gun, without any effort at all probably. The threat of a gun had just been a way to control her in the short term, and the subsequent disassembly had just been a way to scare her. It worked. She gulped down the last of her water.

"Great, well since my boss is dead," Mills had to try very hard not to look over at the mangled pool of flesh that she assumed had once been Meyers. "I suppose I'll take the SUV back to the real world and try to forget people with superpowers exist."

"Better idea," Dylan said, and picked up another battered half-full water bottle. "I buy you breakfast and you tell me everything you know about Myers and his boss."

Somehow his civility was the spookiest thing about him.

+++

Dylan drove them right into the center of Bright Falls, keeping one eye on Karen as they entered town. He didn't catch any flicker of recognition on her face, so she was either a good actress or really didn't know anything about the place. He wondered if Meyers had known, if that's why they'd tried to take him so close to town. Maybe some advantage they had here? No way to know now, the man's grey matter was smeared over a square meter grass now, being nibbled at by crows most likely. Dylan idly wondered why he hadn't left Karen's grey matter there as well, but-

The car had been silent a long time after they pulled back onto a paved road. Dylan had wanted to grill the woman for information, but she didn't seem completely up to the task, and once she was sitting in his passenger seat she had seemed to deflate. Dylan's questions were met with long pauses and stuttered words, so he stopped asking for the time being. After the shitshow in the meadow he was less worried about his one-time pursuers: if three scared agents with handguns was their idea of a field team, he had little to fear. He would have liked to be sure that was the most danger these rookies would offer, but it sounded like Karen didn't know much about who the hell she worked for based on what little she'd told Dylan. She hadn't exactly been chatty, but had offered bits of information as they'd prepared to leave the forest. Dylan had helped her wash the blood from her hair, pouring a slow stream of water from a series of half full bottles as she gingerly worked around the gash on her scalp. He'd taken a look after the water ran mostly clear: she had a scrape from jagged metal, but was shallow and wouldn't need stitches. He had parted her hair to the side, hiding the coagulating mess of skin and blood, and told her as much. 

Karen had almost balked when he told her they were leaving the SUV, but after just a minute of her working through frustrated facial expressions in silence she had agreed. He'd watched as she rooted through the back seat for a suitcase, changed from her bloody and wet dress shirt into a tee shirt, and downed what was a probably inadvisable amount of painkillers.

She hadn't grabbed a gun, which was odd. He was sure there were indeed other guns in the SUV, and that she wanted one, but the entire time she'd gone through the vehicle in preparation to leave it her hands had been visible and no firearms had appeared. There was probably one in her suitcase, which she had thrown in his trunk, but still: it wasn't on her person and he wondered why.

Finally, a little after dawn, she seemed to be looking around more actively and he started asking questions-

"How long you been working for this little team?"

She glanced over at him like she'd just remembered he was there. It took a moment, but this time her answer was clear and her voice didn't have the confused tone of shock, "Just a few months. I think, uh, the started paying me in June, but told me I was 'on retainer' until they needed me. Didn't get the call for this road trip until July."

"Call from who?"

"Meyers."

"What'd he tell you?"

"That Williams was gonna come pick me up and to pack a bag. William's had you license plate and a hotel name, and we tailed you from there. He had a map, only it wasn't even of Canada. It was of fuckin London, I swear to god. He always knew where you were, though. Damned if I know how," she trailed off.

"Magic map," Dylan said. She didn't even object to the seeming nonsense. 

Karen's hair was mostly dry when they parked, her window having been rolled down the whole drive there. She didn't even look particularly woozy or concussed as they strolled across the too-wide street to the diner, and let Dylan take a seat at the booth in the back corner of the diner without raising a brow. Her back was to the door, and she was either too green or too tired to care.

"Two coffees, please. We're a little hungover," Dylan smiled at the waitress and squinted in the light, and the waitress smiled right back and spoke softly.

"Course, hun. Here's the menus, I'll give you two a minute to decide while I get a fresh pot on for ya."

Karen watched the exchange with eyes that were too wide to be tired.

"Know where we are?" Dylan asked once the waitress was out of earshot. He made a conscious effort to stop bouncing his knee.

"Sign said Bright Falls."

Damn. "Right, and that name doesn't mean anything to you?"

"When we met up with Meyer's in Kent," her voice was slow. "He said he'd driven all night from Bright Falls and was tired. We'd been on the road for seven hours, but he wouldn't let us stop and he didn't want to drive, just slept in the back seat. Meyer's had always been a dick."

"Any idea what he was doing here?"

"No."

Their coffee arrived. Dylan ordered pancakes with ham and eggs, Karen ordered dry toast. The waitress smiled and left them alone, buying the hungover couple having a fight story they had accidentally constructed. 

He felt like it should have been a nice morning.

Dylan finished his breakfast while his companion pushed around a crust of bread, then when it was apparent she was just playing with her food he left two twenty dollar bills still crisp from the ATM on the table and stood. His eyes found a flyer on the back wall of the diner, faded and old. The lightbulb over the paper flickered once, then burned brighter, showing a sweeping view of-

"I know a place on the lake." He hadn't known where they were going until he said the words.

Karen followed without comment as far as the car, but didn't open the passenger door. Dylan paused with his door open, staring over the roof of the car, and watched the woman glare as she thought over her words. 

"What the fuck are we doing," was what she eventually asked.

"Sightseeing."

Karen didn't even reply, just stared as though Dylan hadn't spoken.

"Fine, I'll explain in the car," he shrugged, unsure why he was going to explain at all, why he wasn't just driving away with her standing slack jawed beside the road, or why he wasn't leaving her bleeding out beside the road. She'd probably be slack-jawed then too. 

Karen was in the car and the engine was running before he could totally dismiss the thought. 

"You don't know what an Altered Item is, do you Karen?" His voice was sharper than he had intended, but that didn't slow her down.

"I can make an educated fucking guess. And it's Mills."

Dylan relaxed his death grip on the steering wheel and intentionally unclenched his jaw. He took a few deep breaths, and imagined a triplicate chime sounding quietly, trying to remember all the "right" phrases from training and presentations and a million shitty multiple choice tests. Dylan didn't know how to start explaining the world Karen had walked into. He began to quote a presentation he had heard a thousand times verbatim, almost able to hear Darling's voice behind his own, and hoped she wouldn't interrupt to ask questions.

She didn't, held them all in until he was out of words. He didn't know how long he'd been talking, miles into the hills.

"And that is probably more than any other civilian has ever been told about the FBC," he finished. The car was silent: they were almost to Cauldron Lake now, taking a slow curve that left a breathtaking view out the passenger side window. Karen was ignoring it to stare at Dylan and finally found her questions.

"Who the fuck ARE you?"

And okay, fair question.

"Bastard son who didn't inherit the kingdom."

She didn't even blink, "Who did?"

"My sister."

"Seriously?"

"Well, her title is Director and not Your Majesty, but she gets a magic weapon and a castle. I hear the pay isn't great, but she's shacking up with the court jester which is a whole other story you don't need," Dylan found his voice wasn't as bitter as he'd expected. Ahead the sun reflected green off the windows of the Lodge, making him blink.

"I imagine some of that is a metaphor."

"Less than you'd expect."

"Why," and Karen's voice was slow. "Are you telling me all this?"

She thought he was going to kill her. He wasn't planning on it, but then again-

"Because I wanted to impress upon you just how little you were told by Meyers," he laughed and heard the mania in it. "You were entirely disposable to a group of people who didn't care about you."

"As opposed to you?"

"Oh no, you're entirely disposable to me too. I just thought you'd like answers. There's nothing worse than feeling powerless, is there?" Something in his throat locked up, but he ignored it. They were almost there.

He took the right into the driveway too fast and the detrus of travel bounced around the car, water bottles sloshing in the back seat.

The Lodge was abandoned, gate chained shut. Dylan didn't even slow the car down, just stuck one hand out the window with a snarl, flicked a wrist, and watched as the padlock exploded and the gate jumped backward throwing the metal barricades wide for the car. The windows on the lodge were not green, weren't even mirrored to reflect the light, and the early autumn sunlight bouncing off them now was clear gold. He felt something like rage: they had been green from the road, but of course they had.

Dylan killed the engine, snatched the keys from the ignition, and stormed out of the car and around the building. He didn't know why he was so angry, didn't even realize he was angry at all until he rounded the corner, found himself on a wide patio looking over the lake, and heard himself yell-

"What the fuck do you want?!"

The silence mocked him. Below the lake stretched perfectly blue-green and glittering. The wind was low, moving the trees without sound.

"I'm here, alright? I'm fucking here, I let her live, I didn't go back and kill DK or Joe the way I fucking wanted to. It would have been so much easier without loose ends, god damn it!" He heard Karen rounding the corner of the building well behind him. He stayed facing the lake. "I talked to Darling, I wrote to Jesse, I've been social and communicative and doing the fucking work! I've been doing everything you fucking ask, and you can't even be clear about what you want! I don't know what day it is, god fucking damn it!"

Behind him every window on the south side of the Lodge was fracturing with long cracks and high musical chirps, then it shattered and-

"What the FUCK do you WANT?"

It took long seconds for the echo of the sound to die, for the last shards of broken glass to tumble from frames and smash on the cement below. The lake glittered. The wind was still.

"Well it's Wednesday."

Dylan turned around slowly and stared.

"Wednesday September 30th, to be more exact. The year 2020, for what that's worth, though I think you knew that," Karen rubbed her index finger against her ear as though clearing out the last of his shouting and the gesture was so jarringly familiar he couldn't speak. She continued after a moment. "Also thanks for not killing me?"

Karen stepped to the left, dragged a metal patio chair into the sunlight, and sat. 

"Are we shouting at god?" She sounded uninterested. Dylan just watched her until she shrugged and spoke again, "I probably have a concussion."

Like that explained it.

"Have you been seeing flashes of green?" He finally asked.

"Like that? It's so reflective I can't read the sign." 

She was pointing across an inlet in the lake, along the shoreline, and he followed her finger to a highly polished sign above the doors of a green-blue building. The front of the building faced the lake, which made absolutely no sense, but it gave them a perfect view of the name of the place-

"It says Oceanview Hotel," Dylan read. "Get in the car."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IT LIVES!
> 
> Heeeeeeey, so it's been a hot moment. Apologies. Inktober has kinda been all consuming, and also The Expanse is a whole thing, and planning for NaNo. So updates, they will probably slow for a bit. But if you like art, you can go see my Inktober stuff! Check out un_lapin_noir on Insta for that and random photos of my hair and cats, if that's your jam.
> 
> Otherwise, jeez, I promise to get another chapter up by November!
> 
> Also, you get it?!? You get it?!?! IT'S NOT A LAKE IT'S AN OCEAN?!?! I think I'm so damn clever.


End file.
